Poetry in General - (Literature Now) by Keegan Cook Finberg

About the Book

""In the second half of the twentieth century, poetry, broadly understood, leapt out of books and became an interdisciplinary public form. Poets drew on the world around them to engage with the arenas of work and politics in responding to the degradation of the social democratic notion of the public in the United States. During this period of privatization and public austerity, poetry strove to become a capacious force in the arts. However, recognizing a changing sense of agency in the restricted public sphere, the poets and works discussed in Poetry in General examine whether poetry can really do anything in a social or political sense. Beginning with the early 60s work of Fluxus artist, Yoko Ono, and New York School Poet, Frank O'Hara, Keegan Cook Finberg examines how these poets/artists drew upon and disrupted conventional ideas about work and the public sphere. Putting together techniques of both abstraction and confession, this expanded category of poetry made space for exchange and coalition-building within poetic production. 60s' optimism was soon replaced by fears of privatization that affected women in particular, and poets such as Adrian Piper and Bernadette Mayer drew on constraint-based forms to protest restricted abortion access and the stigmatization of welfare services. In the last part of the book, Finberg considers the response to the solidification of neoliberalism by examining poetry that interprets moments of atrocity and excess. Techniques of conceptual poetry and documentary poetics transformed official documents to critically examine contemporary politics. Examples include creative reworkings of an important legal case for abolition retold (NourbeSe Philip), the dialogue of an 11-hour filibuster to thwart anti-choice legislation (Wendy Davis), and credit documents from the 2008 recession (Mathew Timmons), which reveal public ways to read and interpret racial capitalism, anti-abortion legislation, and mass debt.""--

Book Synopsis

In the second half of the twentieth century, poetry leapt out of books and became an interdisciplinary public form. Poetry entered bureaucratic systems of organization like index card catalogues; it pushed the boundaries of privately owned public parks. Keegan Cook Finberg argues that poetry became an increasingly capacious force during this period because it could speak directly to the degradation of the social-democratic notion of the public.

Poetry in General explores how poets expanded their practice into the realms of politics, work, and everyday life from 1960 to the present, from the apex of the welfare state to an era of privatization and austerity. It considers a compelling array of figures--including Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and M. NourbeSe Philip--whose works draw on conceptual techniques to transform official documents and spaces. Finberg shows how these public texts expose the mechanisms of the neoliberal consensus about work and leisure, the state's facilitation of capitalism, and enduring racial and gender inequities. She also provides politically charged ways to interpret and critique racial capitalism, antiabortion legislation, and mass debt. A new literary and institutional history of postwar poetics, this book shows how poetic experiments address the privatization of collective life and rethink the category of the public.

Review Quotes

Poetry rarely gets to be general, but Keegan Cook Finberg blasts past misconceptions of marginality, framing it as a vibrant, interdisciplinary, public practice. What a relief to see this truth so clearly stated: Poetry--when at its weirdest!--is uniquely positioned to contest the state's facilitation of capital.--Sarah Dowling, author of Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form

Keegan Cook Finberg takes poems seriously enough to see their claims on expanding the genre of poetry itself. Recognizing ambitions beyond individual expression, Poetry in General reads poems not as private refuges from social politics but as urgent interlocutors in a world of increasing privatization and politically managed bodies.--Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

What a generous and generative study of contemporary American poetry. This is a serious work of materialist criticism in which "poetry in general" is imagined through and with our most important economic and discursive formations, from infrastructure to accumulation to the public sphere itself. Finberg demonstrates throughout an ability to locate in poetry a social archive of our present, and this book will be of interest to all scholars concerned with twenty-first century literary form and philosophical aesthetics.--Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Wages Against Artwork: Socially Engaged Art and the Claims of Decommodified Labor

With Poetry in General, Keegan Cook Finberg advances a notion of the public as a practical fiction enacted in and through social forms that exist not despite the atomized and bureaucratized forms of daily life, but through the extensive paper trails those forms generate. Poetry becomes a way of bearing witness to and living with changing social forms. With wit and verve, Finberg conceptually remaps postwar US poetry.--Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production

About the Author

Keegan Cook Finberg is an assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Departments of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.